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CHINA'S GREAT LEAP BACKWARDS
Peter Kwong
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"millionaires' fair" in Shanghai, with $60,000 diamond-studded dog leashes
to one
of the most savagely repressed working class and peasantry on
the planet. How China's
leaders swapped Marx and Mao for Milton Friedman. Alexander Cockburn
on What's wrong with the U.S. left.
They're sitting in darkened rooms weaving conspiracy fantasies
about 9/11; they're blogging; they're confusing a medium with
a movement; they're not doing enough to stop the war in Iraq.
John Ross
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This year the 9th of July is a bitter
day for Palestinians. The Occupation Army besieges Gaza, massacres
its people and attacks its infrastructure. The ghettos of the
West Bank take shape as the Apartheid Wall edges closer to completion
and the Palestinian exodus from Jerusalem has begun. Over 9000
Palestinians sit in Israeli prison cells whilst Palestinians
who remain on their 1948 lands do so under the subjugation of
the most vicious and discriminatory Apartheid system.
The brief euphoria of two years
ago, following the ruling of the International Court of Justice
(ICJ) on the Wall, is a distant memory. Some hailed a victory
for international law in Palestine when the ICJ ruled the Wall
illegal and condemned the Occupation along with other Israeli
crimes. It asked the international community to enforce the IV
Geneva convention and "not to render any aid or assistance
to the Wall and the associated regime".
Two years later, as the Palestinian
people prepare to march to the UN offices, they know that nobody
has taken up this latest verdict to stop the escalation of the
Occupation in Palestine. The Apartheid Wall scythes through the
landscape as it nears completion, forming part of an intricate
system of control with the fortified settler-only roads to steal
48% of lands in the West Bank. Palestinians in Gaza, 80% of whom
are refugees from the lands they were expelled from in 1948,
are imprisoned behind two Walls. Cut-off from the rest of the
world, their privilege after the Israeli sham of "disengagement"
is to starve in the world's largest open-air prison, subject
to continuous bombings, sonic booms and service cut-offs.
In front of these crimes, at
a time when Palestinians struggling for their freedom call for
increased ties of solidarity, the reaction of the international
community and member states of the UN is to show their disdain
for Palestinian efforts to shake off the shackles of Occupation.
The global community pleads for the release of one Israeli taken
from a tank, stationed outside the Gaza ghetto, whilst Palestinians
are taken from their beds and killed in the streets and half
of their government and 1/3 of the Palestinian Legislative Council
are taken hostage. They beg for his return whilst ignoring the
9000 Palestinians rotting in Israeli jails, over 400 of whom
are children.
Global agencies confine their
operations to fact-finding missions on the "Palestinian
situation" speculating endlessly on humanitarian issues
as if Palestine were in the throws of some natural disaster.
Reeling off further UN humanitarian reports are not asked for.
Palestinians don't need to be told by the World Bank about their
own poverty and they don't need the hollow rhetorical support
of governments which fail to follow up words with deeds. The
facts on the ground in Palestine are there for all to see. We
need action. We need political pressure on the Occupation. We
need freedom.
The manner in which the international
community has dealt with the ICJ decision (and indeed with any
other UN resolution including the refugees' right of return)
shows the UN as an impotent and discredited institution where
the unity of the powerful in the Security Council continues to
oversee and comply with the expulsion of our people.
The General Assembly resolution,
which endorsed the ICJ decision, only asked the General Secretary
to build up a registry for damages and losses from the Wall.
The absurdity of building a registry of the ever-rising damages,
instead of preparing concrete measures to pressure Israel to
dismantle the Wall is evident. Worse still, the General Secretary
has refused to even visit the Wall, preferring not to provoke
his masters in Washington and New York who pull the strings.
And now, it would appear that registry might not complete any
evaluation of losses, effectively ensuring that no reparations
will ever be requisitioned from the Occupation. This ensures
the criminal doesn't stop its war crimes, but moreover, that
it will never be held accountable.
While the silence of the international
community might be shocking, Palestinians and their supporters
are well aware of the deft machinations of global powers complicit
with their Occupation. Increasingly they have witnessed global
government abscond from the responsibilities of international
law and pursue the globalization of the Occupation. Now the international
community, together with Israel, places sanctions on the Palestinian
people for having conducted the democratic vote the world asked
them for.
They aim to topple a Palestinian
leadership which refuses to be compliant with the wishes of the
Occupation. With that goal comes the vision of creating new mechanisms
of control to bypass the Palestinian Authority and any source
of democratic accountability to the Palestinian people. The result
is the Temporary International Mechanism (TIM), the new structure
proselytised by the EU to ensure political and economic control
for the World Bank to rule and subjugate the Palestinian people.
The mechanism is apparently set out to destroy the PA administrative
structure (excluding the Presidential Office) while international
banks are to distribute money for the starving. $40 million -
roughly a third of the money made available to create this International
Mechanism of support for the Occupation - goes directly to
Apartheid Israel to pay its companies for fuel and other basic
supplies. This comes as the Occupation continues to steal some
$75 million every month of Palestinian tax money and from which
such expenses were previously covered.
While Israel controls us militarily,
confines us behind Walls and carves out our ghettos, powerful
global agencies take over the administrative and financial burdens
of the Occupation seeking minimum subsistence for the people
imprisoned in the Bantustans. Any glimmer of hope that the UN,
the EU, the ICJ or the "Free World" might work towards
implementing Palestinian rights appears more distant than ever.
Latin America negotiates Free Trade Agreements with the Occupation
and Asian countries display overtures of normalization with Apartheid
Israel as our people are massacred in the streets.
Our hopes thus rest with the
people themselves, to accelerate boycott, divestment and sanctions
(BDS) to isolate apartheid Israel and punish it for the war crimes
it pursues against us. It is our supporters, amongst the millions
of justice seeking people across the world that we look to in
pushing forward solidarity actions and restoring some dignity
to international law.
We urge the implementation
of the ICJ, we urge the signatories of the Geneva Convention
to fulfil their commitments, and we call for immediate measures
to ensure that all UN resolutions are carried out, that the Occupation
ends and our refugees return home. While the World Bank, the
United States and the Occupation itself may be powerful, they
will continue to find an unwilling subject in the Palestinian
people who stay steadfast to the greater ideals of freedom, justice
and liberation.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
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